CM Sentinel Advance II Mouse and RX Pad Review

Introduction:

Cooler Master is at it again…we’ve seen so much from them lately on the peripheral side with two new keyboards in just the last month! Today we are going to take a look at a couple products that have been circulating the market since mid-March. We will be getting personal with the Sentinel Advance II and one of CM’s speed RX mouse pads. Two products that cannot live without the other (and NO that does not mean you have to buy these two together) will be tested out and compared to some of my favorite mice and pads. I hope they can hold up to the task!

Some of you might recognize the Sentinel Advance name. This is because CM has really already released this mouse under a couple different names. The Sentinel Advance and the Sentinel Zero-G (I had the Zero-G Shattered Horizon edition) have both been released previously with pretty much the exact same outer body with a few inner changes for improvement. So if you had one in the past and loved it, this is likely just another birthing of the same thing with perhaps a subtle new feature. Either way, we’ll work this thing hard to see what it can do. It’s time we start taking a look at the mouse and pad.

Closer Look:

Taking a look at the mouse box, it is clear a lot of effort was put in to grab the consumer's attention at the store. To be honest, with a pretty high percentage of enthusiasts buying hardware and components online (other than those with a decent store locally), the packaging almost goes to waste. It’s fancy and fun to look at, but once I’ve ordered the product and it’s been delivered to my house, I just want to open it, not look at the features.

Anyway, the front of the box tells you right away what the difference is between this and the previous Sentinel mice – it has a "New Sensor". The mouse itself appears to be on fire, literally, and is glowing with ferocity. The back of the box lists a bunch of features, including the usual DPI limits as well as polling rates and even some on-mouse memory to recall profile settings rig-to-rig.

The box has one of those flip folds that gives you a nice plastic wrap version of the product to look at before you buy it. It lets you see the actual product rather than some super nice pictures of it; that shows Cooler Master’s high confidence in the product alone. You can even put your hand on the mouse to test out size and fit – I really like this opportunity when buying something. I almost wish you could test more products before buying them (becoming a reviewer has really changed the way I look and decide to buy things). More features are listed on the inside panel here – we’ll cover each one as we look closer at the mouse.

Before we tear open the box, my favorite task, let’s take a look at the Speed RX-L (large) pad that showed up with the mouse as well. The box is a simple rectangular box that contains the mouse pad rolled up neatly inside. The box shows red-printed military figurines on a black background with an actual picture of the mouse pad (with the Sentinel mouse on it) just off to the right. The Cooler Master logo fills the upper left corner while you get the CMSTORM logo to confirm authenticity.

Taking a look at each side of the box we get a little more information. The front of the box is as explained above, showing the product name and company name in bold. The next side of the box has a bit of an "introduction", giving a brief rationale for the Speed-RX's creation. It is a pad for optical gaming sensors to work just as well with high-end laser sensors, while providing "excellent tracking" and "speedy glide". It is a pad worthy of any mouse design – not just for a CM mouse.

Rolling the box over one more turn reveals nothing much more than the term "Gaming Mouse Pad" in more languages than I want to count. The last side of the box gives a list of features, in English, and a quick set of specifications to give you an idea for size; 460 x 350 x 5 mm. A texture square is glued to the box to give you a quick feel of what you are getting into.

I decided the little square of fabric was quite nifty and got a closer shot for you to look at. It’s like when you go to buy sheets and they have a little cut out window so you can feel the actual sheets themselves. I tend to always grab the package from the back – I hate thinking about all the people who’ve touched the little square (I guess it’s only a fraction of the entire sheet, but…). Anyway, that is beside the point, train back on track; the patch here is on the outside, it’s not actually the mouse pad (nor the same thickness), but it gives you the feel of the outer cloth layer. To me it doesn’t seem to be anything too special; I do find it a neat sales tactic, but I do digress.